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Maple Leafs’ Matthews, Domi break through in hard-fought comeback

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TORONTO — Seven hours before his Toronto Maple Leafs took the ice for one of its biggest tests of the campaign — a Saturday-night tilt with the Boston Bruins — Sheldon Keefe sent a message to the leaders of his team. One in particular.

Coming off a stretch that saw Auston Matthews go goalless for four games — with just one in his past nine outings — the coach made clear where he stood on No. 34’s play of late.

“He’s got to do better,” Keefe said Saturday morning. “Don’t focus on the end result, or get concerned with anything other than doing the things that allow you to have success — individually, and for us as a team, most importantly.

“Auston’s a driver for our team. When he’s going, we’re going.”

By the end of the night, after a hard-fought battle that pushed these Leafs to their fifth extra-time effort in six games, Matthews had his coach singing a different tune.

“I thought he was a beast out there tonight,” Keefe said.

It was off Matthews’ stick that the home side found some life under the Scotiabank Arena lights Saturday night. The former 60-goal man got the Maple Leafs on the board 12 minutes into the second period — after the B’s had jumped out to a 2-0 lead — and then cashed in a second time with only seconds remaining in the third period, salvaging a point from the near-wreckage.

“I thought he was all over the puck,” Keefe said of his lead sniper. “I thought he attacked the net, he shot the puck. Obviously two huge goals for us. I thought he was excellent.”

The pair of tallies didn’t come easy, though. Not against a Bruins team that has made its name stifling the best offences in the game.

“I thought they were on the puck. I mean, that’s a hard team to play against,” Keefe continued. “They don’t give you much. You’ve got to earn absolutely everything. And they had looks. I mean, Auston’s first goal — that’s just earning it. There’s nothing cute about that.

“We found our way to the interior of the rink, against a team that makes it really hard to do so.”

The return of that jump in Matthews’ step, the return of that Midas touch, wasn’t lost on his teammates looking on from the bench, too.

“I think tonight they found a little magic again,” defender Simon Benoit said of Matthews and his linemates, William Nylander and Matthew Knies, who combined for a total of 19 shots on net. “They were buzzing, they were skating, they were playing physical.

“When they play like that, they dominate, for sure.”

But the brief return to form for the club’s lead talent wasn’t enough to seal the win, even with some late-game heroics and 40 shots thrown at Boston’s Linus Ullmark. And yet, the hosts are taking the one point earned as a sign of progress.

“I think it’s just two competitive teams,” Matthews said of the eventual 4-3 OT loss, once the final buzzer had sounded. “They’ve been the class of the league the last two years and the way they’ve been playing we knew it was going to be a challenge. I liked the way that we came out and played, and obviously it could’ve went either way.

“It definitely leaves a sour taste in your mouth heading home. But I thought the process that we had, and a lot of really, really good things that we did as a team — you’ve got to take those positives and continue to build momentum moving forward.”

“I thought it was a hard-played hockey game by both teams,” Keefe agreed. “Not a lot between the two teams — two teams playing hard, referees let the teams play. You know, not your typical early-December hockey game. It was a tough game out there.

“It was fast, competitive, and I thought our guys hung right there, fought their way back, and got us another point.”

Woll and Ullmark’s best saves from Maple Leafs vs. Bruins overtime

While Matthews pulled that point out of a near-loss, one-timing home the club’s second tying goal of the night in the dying seconds of the third, it was Max Domi who took the first turn as hero.

Down 2-1 after 40 minutes, the Maple Leafs were outshooting the visitors but having difficulty breaking through the suffocating Bruins defence with any type of consistency. But a sprint from Domi pulled the crowd to the edge of their seats.

The puck made its way to Nick Robertson, streaking down the right side of the offensive zone. The 22-year-old flipped it over to Domi, who collected it in the slot with acres of space around him, flashed forehand, then slipped the puck to his backhand and roofed it. The crowd erupted.

Max Domi finds space and puts away the backhand to score his first as a Maple Leaf

“It’s huge. Huge for him, and a big one [for us],” Keefe said of the goal, Domi’s first in a Maple Leafs sweater. “He’s done well for us — he’s found ways to contribute for us, in different ways, obviously. He’s made some plays to make others look good. So it’s great for him to have that moment.”

“It means a lot,” said Matthews. “It’s huge for him. He’s definitely shown that he’s a distributor and a pass-first guy, but it’s always nice to get the first one off your back. And it was a really big goal for us.”

“Just seeing the crowd respond to his goal like that,” added netminder Joseph Woll, “it was pretty cool.”

The moment wasn’t lost on No. 11 himself, either.

“I’ve said it from Day 1, I’m super happy to be playing at home, in front of my hometown fans. I’m enjoying every second of it,” Domi said from the bowels of Scotiabank Arena post-game, mulling the ovation from the Toronto faithful. Now, the hope is that he can keep them on their feet. “Of course you want to help. You want to contribute once in a while. But I mean, honestly, sometimes they want to go in, sometimes they don’t. Hopefully now we can start stringing some goals together.”

Still, hometown moment aside, team-wide progress aside, there’s only so much enjoyment to take from a night that ends with the other team’s hands raised.

“Of course it feels good to contribute. But that s— is irrelevant when you don’t win,” Domi said of the hard-fought comeback that fell just short. “Obviously we wanted to come away with two points there. But the boys battled back, showed a lot of character against a real good team, a well-coached team. They’re a heck of a hockey club for a reason.

“So, good test, and I think our group showed what we’re capable of. If we find a way to string 60 minutes together like that, we’ll be a tough team to beat as well.”

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Soccer legend Christine Sinclair says goodbye in Vancouver |

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Christine Sinclair scored one final goal at B.C. Place, helping the Portland Thorns to a 6-0 victory over the Whitecaps Girls Elite team. The soccer legend has announced she’ll retire from professional soccer at the end of the National Women’s Soccer League season. (Oct. 16, 2024)

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A German in charge of England? Nationality matters less than it used to in international soccer

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The question was inevitable.

At his first news conference as England’s newly appointed head coach, Thomas Tuchel – a German – was asked on Wednesday what message he had for fans who would have preferred an Englishman in charge of their beloved national team.

“I’m sorry, I just have a German passport,” he said, laughing, and went on to profess his love for English football and the country itself. “I will do everything to show respect to this role and to this country.”

The soccer rivalry between England and Germany runs deep and it’s likely Tuchel’s passport will be used against him if he doesn’t deliver results for a nation that hasn’t lifted a men’s trophy since 1966. But his appointment as England’s third foreign coach shows that, increasingly, even the top countries in the sport are abandoning the long-held belief that the national team must be led by one of their own.

Four of the top nine teams in the FIFA world rankings now have foreign coaches. Even in Germany, a four-time World Cup winner which has never had a foreign coach, candidates such as Dutchman Louis van Gaal and Austrian Oliver Glasner were considered serious contenders for the top job before the country’s soccer federation last year settled on Julian Nagelsmann, who is German.

“The coaching methods are universal and there for everyone to apply,” said German soccer researcher and author Christoph Wagner, whose recent book “Crossing the Line?” historically addresses Anglo-German rivalry. “It’s more the personality that counts and not the nationality. You could be a great coach, and work with a group of players who aren’t perceptive enough to get your methods.”

Not everyone agrees.

English soccer author and journalist Jonathan Wilson said it was “an admission of failure” for a major soccer nation to have a coach from a different country.

“Personally, I think it should be the best of one country versus the best of another country, and that would probably extend to coaches as well as players,” said Wilson, whose books include “Inverting The Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics.”

“To say we can’t find anyone in our country who is good enough to coach our players,” he said, “I think there is something slightly embarrassing, slightly distasteful about that.”

That sentiment was echoed by British tabloid The Daily Mail, which reported on Tuchel’s appointment with the provocative headline “A Dark Day for England.”

While foreign coaches are often found in smaller countries and those further down the world rankings, they are still a rarity among the traditional powers of the game. Italy, another four-time world champion, has only had Italians in charge. All of Spain’s coaches in its modern-day history have been Spanish nationals. Five-time World Cup winner Brazil has had only Brazilians in charge since 1965, and two-time world champion France only Frenchmen since 1975.

And it remains the case that every World Cup-winning team, since the first tournament in 1930, has been coached by a native of that country. The situation is similar for the women’s World Cup, which has never been won by a team with a foreign coach, though Jill Ellis, who led the U.S. to two trophies, is a naturalized U.S. citizen born in England.

Some coaches have made a career out of jumping from one national team to the next. Lars Lagerbäck, 76, coached his native Sweden between 2000-09 and went on to lead the national teams of Nigeria, Iceland and Norway.

“I couldn’t say I felt any big difference,” Lagerbäck told The Associated Press. “I felt they were my teams and the people’s teams.”

For Lagerbäck, the obvious disadvantages of coaching a foreign country were any language difficulties and having to adapt to a new culture, which he particularly felt during his brief time with Nigeria in 2010 when he led the African country at the World Cup.

Otherwise, he said, “it depends on the results” — and Lagerbäck is remembered with fondness in Iceland, especially, after leading the country to Euro 2016 for its first ever international tournament, where it knocked out England in the round of 16.

Lagerbäck pointed to the strong education and sheer number of coaches available in soccer powers like Spain and Italy to explain why they haven’t needed to turn to an overseas coach. At this year’s European Championship, five of the coaches were from Italy and the winning coach was Luis de la Fuente, who was promoted to Spain’s senior team after being in charge of the youth teams.

Portugal for the first time looked outside its own borders or Brazil, with which it has historical ties, when it appointed Spaniard Roberto Martinez as national team coach last year. Also last year, Brazil tried — and ultimately failed — to court Real Madrid’s Italian coach Carlo Ancelotti, with Brazilian soccer federation president Ednaldo Rodrigues saying: “It doesn’t matter if it’s a foreigner or a Brazilian, there’s no prejudice about the nationality.”

The United States has had a long list of foreign coaches before Mauricio Pochettino, the Argentine former Chelsea manager who took over as the men’s head coach this year.

The English Football Association certainly had no qualms making Tuchel the national team’s third foreign-born coach, after Swede Sven-Goran Eriksson (2001-06) and Italian Fabio Capello (2008-12), simply believing he was the best available coach on the market.

Unlike Eriksson and Capello, Tuchel at least had previous experience of working in English soccer — he won the Champions League in an 18-month spell with Chelsea — and he also speaks better English.

That won’t satisfy all the nay-sayers, though.

“Hopefully I can convince them and show them and prove to them that I’m proud to be the English manager,” Tuchel said.

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AP Sports Writer Jerome Pugmire in Paris contributed to this story.

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Maple Leafs winger Bobby McMann finding game after opening-night scratch

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TORONTO – Bobby McMann watched from the press box on opening night.

Just over a week later, the Maple Leafs winger took a twirl as the first star.

McMann went from healthy scratch to unlikely offensive focal point in just eight days, putting up two goals in Toronto’s 6-2 victory over the Los Angeles Kings on Wednesday.

The odd man out at the Bell Centre against the Montreal Canadiens, he’s slowly earning the trust of first-year head coach Craig Berube.

“There’s a lot of good players on this team,” McMann said of his reaction to sitting out Game 1. “Maybe some guys fit better in certain scenarios than others … just knowing that my opportunity would come.”

The Wainwright, Alta., product skated on the second line with William Nylander and Max Domi against Los Angeles, finishing with those two goals, three hits and a plus-3 rating in just over 14 minutes of work.

“He’s been unbelievable,” said Nylander, who’s tied with McMann for the team lead with three goals. “It’s great when a player like that comes in.”

The 28-year-old burst onto the scene last February when he went from projected scratch to hat-trick hero in a single day after then-captain John Tavares fell ill.

McMann would finish 2023-24 with 15 goals and 24 points in 56 games before a knee injury ruled him out of Toronto’s first-round playoff loss to the Boston Bruins.

“Any time you have success, it helps the confidence,” he said. “But I always trust the abilities and trust that they’re there whether things are going in or (I’m not) getting points. Just trying to play my game and trust that doing the little things right will pay off.”

McMann was among the Leafs’ best players against the Kings — and not just because of what he did on the scoresheet. The forward got into a scuffle with Phillip Danault in the second period before crushing Mikey Anderson with a clean hit in the third.

“He’s a power forward,” Berube said. “That’s how he should think the game, night in and night out, as being a power forward with his skating and his size. He doesn’t have to complicate the game.”

Leafs goaltender Anthony Stolarz knew nothing about McMann before joining Toronto in free agency over the summer.

“Great two-way player,” said the netminder. “Extremely physical and moves really well, has a good shot. He’s a key player for us in our depth. I was really happy for him to get those two goals.

“Works his butt off.”

ON TARGET

Leafs captain Auston Matthews, who scored 69 times last season, ripped his first goal of 2024-25 after going without a point through the first three games.

“It’s not going to go in every night,” said Matthews, who added two assists against the Kings. “It’s good to see one fall … a little bit of the weight lifted off your shoulders.”

WAKE-UP CALL

Berube was animated on the bench during a third-period timeout after the Kings cut a 5-0 deficit to 5-2.

“Taking care of the puck, being harder in our zone,” Matthews said of the message. “There were times in the game, early in the second, in the third period, where the momentum shifted and we needed to grab it back.”

PATCHES SITS

Toronto winger Max Pacioretty was a healthy scratch after dressing the first three games.

“There’s no message,” Berube said of the 35-year-old’s omission. “We have extra players and not everybody can play every night. That’s the bottom line. He’s been fine when he’s played, but I’ve got to make decisions as a coach, and I’m going to make those decisions — what I think is best for the team.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Oct. 17, 2024.

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The Canadian Press. All rights reserved.

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